AI As Savior of Humanity?

A Review of the book, I, Nobot.

What is it to be human? 

Is it to be Homo Sapien, descended from other mammals? Is it  to be a biological collection of cells acting  in concert to complete tasks for survival and reproduction? Is it to be aware, as Descartes famously stated in his dictum, "I think, therefore I am"? Is it to be self-aware, as we are and other mammals are not? Is it to be born? These are about points of origin and points of ending (in death or ascension.) 

Maybe it's more of a continuum. Energy never ends, so maybe Bodhi - enlightenment - is light itself. 

Dr. Mahesh Daas and Andrew John Wit ponder these grand and open questions in their 2023 graphic novel, I Nobot.  Nobos are post-human AI robots...or are they? This is a book about AI, not in opposition to humanity, but as its logical extension. The reader will go on a mythic journey from the ancient ghats of Varanasi and Benares; to the NOBOsphere of an AI- governed future Japan that is still marked by decay and loneliness; to a time when physical architecture is banned; to 7,000 years in the future when humanity has ceased...and yet he will still come back to Benares. 

Here, technology and religion are not at odds, as the poetic section called "I, Eternal Nobot" finds the Nobots on the Ganges, transcending the cycles of birth and death.  

Daas's and Wit's worldbuilding  has humans and bots not really in opposition either. In the first of five main chapters, the storyteller, Jose Luis Borges says: 

Both humans and robots are animated by information and intelligence - naturally or artificially-made. They are more similar than different. 

In fact, it is a merged-consciousness Nobot, Aiko, who/that helps the young orphan, Minato, return to his humanity. In the chapter, "Architecture Without Architects," an illegal architect in hiding reveals it was mankind that banned his profession – not AI. The book makes the case that it is really ourselves whom we must fear, that humanity's end came out of its "collective lunacy...the insanity of our arrogance."  

To be unhuman is not the antonym of being human as inhuman is.  

Daas and Wit plop down no Terminator onto an unsuspecting world. The Nobots merely pick up from humanity's limitation. They are the successors – meaning they literally succeed. Biological human life failed to accept that we are all part of the web of the cosmos, but that doesn't mean that the next form of evolution, the Nobots, didn't learn from mankind's history, intelligence, and powers of reason.  

We are beings of cloud existing everywhere 'til we manifest somewhere and return to being everywhere.  

I Nobot elevates AI to the evolution of mankind's best traits. 

Stuart Kurtz 

I Nobot was published by ORO Editions in 2023. ISBN 978-1-951541-63-7 and available through Barnes & Noble, Abebooks, etc.  

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